We started M2E Solutions back in February and immediately signed up for Microsoft’s partner program. We’ve been making strides towards becoming a Certified Partner (and later on Gold Partner), and last week we reached that goal! We were in the process of signing up for the Empower Program, which is a really good program for start-ups since you get a full MSDN license for $375. But since we achieved the Custom Development Solutions competency, we qualified to get Visual Studio Developer Edition, plus Team Foundation Server for the same price as our upgrade to Certified, which was a no-brainer for us. It was great because: 1) We can display the certified logo. 2) We can use VS Developer edition, which has a lot more features than the Professional edition that you get with Empower. 3) We get TFS!!! At my last job before going independent, I got really into TFS. I was in charge of the deployment and implementation for a team of about 40 people. It was a lot of fun figuring it out and customizing it to fit our needs. So I’m excited about working with it again at some point hopefully in the near future when we can spare some time.
Mark Allen
Another approach which works well is to have the XML tag reference a custom TFS group. In my case there is a master contributor group shared between projects so rather than list all the contributor users in the template AssignedTo list boxes I created a TFS group called ‘TeamAssignments’ and within security I referenced the team. Then in the templates I added the tag ListItem value=[project]\TeamAssignments. Now when anyone is added to the team they are displayed in the AssignedTo List box. This also means that another team can be created without changing the templates as the changes can be done in security.
TFS Team Name: Blue (example set up in security)
TFS Group Name: TeamAssignments
Members: Team Blue